Hotlinking, which is occasionally referred to as bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images which are on another site. Basically, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else could also create a website and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a major issue if you have a smaller personal website, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody can be attempting to copy your website and deceive people. If your hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll run out of resources without getting actual website visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

As our website hosting packages feature a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to secure your content from displaying on third-party Internet sites with literally only two clicks, even if you don't have very much experience with this kind of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and once you open it, you will only have to select the domain or subdomain that you want to protect. Additionally, you could also pick if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You won't have to do anything else, due to the fact that our system will create an .htaccess file automatically inside the preferred location and will add the required code in it. All websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed in exactly the same section, so you could disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that someone is linking to your files without your approval, you may easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security function that we offer you. While the common technique of doing that is to generate an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool which is able to perform this automatically and you will simply have to choose the site in question and to decide whether our system should generate the necessary file within the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our customized Hepsia CP and offers the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any issues even in case you have never used any website hosting service before. You can deactivate the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click from exactly the same section.